This is a case example of sociotechnical issues regarding lab scientists and research IT, observed by a medical informaticist in the pharmaceutical industry, that impaired research scientists' ability to perform drug research and development. (This is a shortened version of a longer story that appears here.)
A primary factor in the impediment to R&D was a pervasive, narrow focus on information technology and empowerment of technologists to make decisions that should have been made by the scientists themselves, rather than a focus on information science (and perhaps common sense) and scientist control of informational resources essential to their creativity and productivity.
A medical informatics specialist was called for an interview with a large pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) organization whose scientific research libraries director was retiring. The hiring manager felt the strong connection between medical informatics and the informational needs of pharma R&D made the informaticist a good fit for the role.
The informaticist was encouraged by this enlightened view, the view that ability and experience in closely related domains can outweigh specific “formal” credentials at mid management levels.
The science libraries reported to this individual out of custom and tradition, based on a rather outdated, 1970’s-ish notion that “if it’s information, the computer people do it.” This surprised and disappointed the informaticist. The informaticist took the position as libraries director hoping to escape the informational backwaters of hospitals for the “information intensive” environment of pharmaceutical R&D. The informaticist reasoned that with the company’s reputation for research excellence, overall attitudes about informatics must be far more progressive than in the typical resource-strained hospital. Nonetheless, the informaticist was wrong.
The library staff related the scientists were indeed underserved, but the library staff felt severely undervalued, were demoralized and were afraid to speak out for fear of their jobs. They also strongly and openly doubted the informaticist could do anything about the problems.
The informaticist embarked on new projects and expanded existing projects designed to significantly improve informational support for drug R&D, starting with a major enterprise analysis designed to identify and remediate gaps in information provision to the research labs. It soon became apparent that the research computing organization supporting drug R&D conflated information technology with information science (i.e., believed that a degree in computer science, information systems or software engineering automatically conferred expertise in information science, and that a biomedical or information science background was unnecessary for leadership roles in the information organization) to a degree clearly paralleled in the delivery sector.
This was due primarily to analogous false assumptions, misconceptions, underestimations, an utter lack of understanding of social informatics issues, and scarcity of biomedical domain expertise in the leadership - with similar results on organizational success. This conflation by senior management led to decisions that effectively gave the IT department significant power over research scientists, through control of the informatics tools they had available.
Most importantly, the informaticist had started fielding complaints from the research labs’ scientific leaders that vital cheminformatics and other informational tools were being rationed to a bit over a hundred scientists out of a worldwide population of thousands, to save a few million dollars annually (out of a research budget orders of magnitude larger). The senior scientific leaders deemed these tools not frills, not just important, but absolutely critical to new drug discovery. Due to patent time limitations on brand-name drugs and the emergence of low-cost generics once a patent expired, new drug discovery and a robust “pipeline” of new drugs under testing is indeed the lifeblood of any pharmaceutical company. Via publicly available information, the informaticist discovered that major competing pharmas had nearly an order of magnitude the number of scientists with access to these tools.
The informaticist heard rumors that some scientists were resorting to using friends and relatives’ accounts for these services at various universities where the relatives were enrolled and who, as students, had free access for educational purposes. The use of others’ academic accounts represented a severe contractual violation for both the universities and the pharma and the informaticist was quite concerned about these rumors.
Indeed, after a detailed resource gaps investigation, the informaticist found the gaps in provision of tools and services approached $4 million annually. As a result, the informaticist put together a detailed business case for increasing the library operational budget to end the rationing. The informaticist stated three levels of remediation: $1.5 million annually would be the bare “urgent” minimum to alleviate the most severe rationing, $2.5 million would be intermediate, and $4 million would be ideal.
As part of the business case, the informaticist included testimonials from senior scientific leaders who stated the urgency of access to these resources.
Almost predictably, and after several rounds of proposal revision (based on other managers’ knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the VP regarding format and semantics), the VP of Research IT grudgingly approved only the minimum amount of $1.5 million, despite times being relatively good and the company spending hundreds of millions annually on advertising alone. The $1.5 million minimal funds enabled only limited improvement in rationing, but at least there was a doubling of scientist access to the most crucial drug discovery informatics tools. (Some would say that “twice nothing is still nothing”, the informaticist thought privately.)
The fact that the information assets were soft (e.g., subscription) and not “tangible” (i.e., as servers or other hardware would be), and that ROI was hard to calculate (the return perhaps not being seen for ten or fifteen years due to the great length of time from compound discovery to actual sales) seemed to play a role in the reluctance to invest further.
The ROI question also remained front and center despite the most critical issue being cost of lost opportunity, a concept the VP of Research IT seemed unwilling or unable to fully grasp. The informaticist felt that the unwillingness to invest a few million dollars annually for the finest discovery informatics tools out of an annual budget in the billions of dollars represented rather risk-adverse, mission hostile behavior.
As a result of the declining scientific productivity and reduced projections of company margins, budgets started to be preemptively cut (despite the company having billions of dollars in cash reserves), perhaps to keep the stock price afloat. The informaticist was asked to plan significant cuts to scientific information resources.
The research IT leadership asked for cuts to be performed based on a metric of “cost per user per resource." The informaticist protested that such a simplistic, information technology-centric metric did not account for value of the resources, nor was a “user” a valid measure since some of these resources were used by individuals, by shifting teams of people based on research priorities at any moment, and by computer applications that fed alerting systems serving individuals and teams in a time-varying and unpredictable manner. However, the Research IT finance person (non-biomedical background, MBA-degreed) and the VP of research IT insisted on these ill-conceived and potentially harmful metrics. The conflation of IT with information science was never clearer to the informaticist than at this point.
Worse, as pressure for cuts became more severe, the informaticist was instructed to cut anything not under contractual obligation. Much of the newly-expanded access to the most critical informatics tools fell under that umbrella. The informaticist warned that the scientists would not look fondly upon such cuts, however, the newly-given tools were indeed taken away from the scientists.
The senior scientific leadership basically revolted at that point. The VP of Research IT was compelled to ask that access to the cut-off tools be restored. Unfortunately, by the terms of the vendor this could not be accomplished until the following quarter, so the newly-facilitated research scientists had to operate once again with one hand tied behind their backs for three months.
The company’s fortunes continued to decline. It appeared that several potential new drugs in late-stage clinical trials were going to fail to make it to market. When that was confirmed, company leadership ordered a large-scale reduction-in-force beginning with mass layoffs.
Despite the informaticist-led reduction in rationing of information tools vital to new drug discovery, despite expansion of eJournals and alerting systems causing a tenfold increase in flow of targeted scientific articles to the labs over decade-long norms (thus filling long unmet needs), despite training several thousand scientists in better information search and retrieval techniques, despite the informaticist being a strong advocate for support of scientific R&D, the informaticist was first in line for separation when large-scale layoffs began.
It was clear this organization learned nothing from medical informatics.
This conflation of information technology and information science seems to exist in numerous pharmas. This was confirmed by enlightened IT friends working in competing pharmas. Numerous pharmas seemed to suffer this problem to one extent or another. (The informaticist once had to explain to the international recruiter who contacted him from yet another large global pharma, not the one in this story, that their VP of Medical Informatics’ understanding of the field was inaccurate. That VP took pioneer Homer Warner’s old definition of medical informatics "the study, invention and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information” quite literally, and believed the field was concerned with computer algorithms to process data.)
Anecdotally, the informaticist has heard from former colleagues at the company that the environment at the company is burning out the layoff survivors and that people are extremely unhappy. Layoffs still continue, which compound the problem of unhappiness and insecurity, especially for middle-aged individuals with a wealth of scientific and corporate knowledge - and mortgages and kids in college. The informaticist wonders how anyone can expect scientific creativity in such an environment.
-- SS
Post Title → Who needs healthcare industry corruption, when stupidity is so prevalent?
